Lonely Hearts and Fractured Minds

I recently deleted a couple of blog entries that were just too depressing (read: too real). I badly needed a distraction, so I decided to watch one of the many movies I've recorded and just stockpiled. Hey, what about this one? I thought. I know it's good, so there will be no surprises.

So I ended up watching (for the tenth time) Lust for Life, starring Kirk Douglas. I knew the movie was brilliant, but I didn't expect it to "take me down" (as John Lennon said in Strawberry Fields). Douglas was too good in the role, looking and acting so much like Van Gogh that it was scary, and taking us down and down and down until we spiralled and sank along with him. 

Enlivening this harrowing scenario was Anthony Quinn, who won a well-deserved Oscar for playing Paul Gauguin. Believe me, I know Paul Gauguin, maybe better than I ever wanted to know him, from reading multiple biographies. He's the stockbroker who ran away from his wife and children (and a life of respectability) to sleep with 13-year-old maidens in Tahiti, before dying of syphilis in his 40s. Along the way, he casually tipped over the known art world and smiled as he watched it fracture, splinter and sink.

Ferocious as Douglas is in his painfully accurate portrayal of Vincent, Quinn just walks off with it, tall and fierce and ruthless ("I like my women fat, vicious and not too bright!"). Two powerhouse actors like these should have cancelled each other out, but they don't. There's a moment when they are arguing (like they do most of the time), and they are tete a tete - face to face so that their profiles almost touch, and it's so perfect. There's respect for each other in this nearly-comic pose, to the point where they can each let the other be their wild, sometimes irrationally crazy selves.

And this photo, taken during a break in the shooting, emphasizes the way they keep out of each other's way, and the respect inherent in recognizing brilliance in each other. Two legendary actors at the very top of their game. (And Kirk Douglas had a profile to die for!) 

But hard on the heels of this exhausting spellbinder, I made another mistake. I opened the Glen Book, which is a binder full of correspondence I kept up with Glen Allen, a Canadian journalist who eventually committed suicide after 65 grinding years of alcoholism and bipolar disorder.

Familiar ground for me, as I've suffered from, and with, both of those conditions, and it's easy to feel cursed by such a thing, when others literally have no idea. This is why Glen and I connected so closely. I never even met the man, in fact it all started with a fan letter I wrote to him for his deeply-moving account of struggling with addiction in The Morningside Papers. But he actually answered me, in his uniquely graceful and melancholy style. And the exchange of letters continued for almost ten years, until I lost touch with him around 2000.

Then at the end of  2005, I opened the Globe and Mail to find a book review I had written for them, and - .

There he was, his picture, with his obituary, describing the tragic  circumstances of his death. He had been hospitalized yet again for depression (and he had undergone ECT numerous times, though with ever-diminishing benefits), and this time he couldn't take it any more. He overdosed on pills, then wandered off, and he was found frozen to death the next day beside some railroad tracks.

This, combined with Kirk Douglas hacking off his ear and shooting himself in the heart, did not help my already-sinking mood, and I wished I had left Glen and his travails in the past where they belonged. He killed himself almost exactly twenty years ago, when I was in the most fragile state I had ever been in (to date - let's not try to look ahead too much). I don't know how I made it through that time, and I didn't have Glen to write to then, but he was suffering in  a way I could barely imagine. He had already tried to kill himself by overdosing and passing out on shore (this was Saint John, New Brunswick, where my kids were born), and waiting for  the tide carry him out. It didn't work, but there was brain  damage, followed by a stroke. Even his brilliant ability to write, to keep a record, began to falter, the worst fate for someone whose writing kept him alive when nothing else worked.

Worst of all was the photo. I had several pictures of Glen when he was doing well, and he was almost handsome in a soft-faced way, like a middle-aged boy. He looked sensitive and sweet, and vulnerable. But in this last photo, which was part of a police report after he had gone missing from the hospital, he did not look like any version of him I had ever seen.

He was listed as being 6' 2" and 150  pounds. Earlier photos showed a man who was quite stocky, probably well over 200 pounds, and here was this wraith, this unnaturally starved-looking man with uncanny eyes, just like two headlamps glistening in a way I recognized from my own bouts of mania. His front tooth had broken off, which added to the feeling  that this couldn't possibly be him. But this is what his disease had reduced him to, a wraithlike figure with feverish eyes and a sort of eerie half-smile with a missing tooth.

I was going to scan and post those pictures, and found that I couldn't. Instead I found the tribute I wrote which was published in the Globe, with a picture that reflects who he really was, until mental illness ate him alive.

So why do I do this to myself? I don't know, and this entry may soon be deleted like the last two. But maybe not. I don't feel hopeless now, but I am struggling, and I do keep wondering if this is my last year on earth, or at least my last year with some semblance of health.

And Christmas is coming. Glen once wrote about his two "slips", lapses in his hard-won sobriety, once at an airport and again at Christmas, "those twin museums of lonely hearts". 

I  recognize the horror in how he ended it, but he had a deep  and abiding compassion for the down-and-out, and even counselled people in halfway houses who were trying to make their way back to some semblance of a normal life. "It is so hard," he told me. The fact he was found frozen beside the railroad tracks had a sort of macabre poetry to it that he might have appreciated.

"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind. . . " And don't think I haven't thought about it - I keep a stockpile of pills that I have hoarded over the years, just in case.  I no longer frequent airports, but that other museum of  lonely hearts, Christmas, is speeding towards me like an inexorable set of headlights. 

But I keep getting up in the morning. So far. 

Glen would have wanted it that way.

"Oh my God, it's MOVING!"

Vincent, you're getting paint all over everything!

How many times have I seen this thing? Like Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz, it just seems to come around.

Except that this one grabs me, every time.

Kirk Douglas excels himself, does better than he knows how, in portraying the awful and sublime life of Vincent Van Gogh. We all know Van Gogh's paintings from the coffee mugs and post cards and tea towels and various fripperies that bear his images. We have all heard reports of the multimillion dollars even his smallest canvases now command.

I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it. I had recorded it on my PVR a few days or weeks earlier and it was sitting there. It was on TCM, so I knew it wouldn't be carved up. I thought, after a shitty week, oh what the hell.

My husband has been away all week. Normally I use this sabbatical as a time for reflection, quiet, and going out to restaurants for one meal at 3 pm. This week was just - oh I don't know, it bored the piss out of me. Things went around and around in circles and some days I didn't even get out due to the wretched house-shaking monsoon outside.

I made fudge and I ate too much of really bad things, like back ribs and fries. I just felt discontent, as if I didn't fit my skin. THEN, early yesterday morning, the power went out, and I felt helpless. Not only was it cold and dark, but my lovebird began to shiver, and I realized with a shock that he wasn't going to survive dramatically dipping temperatures.

I panicked. I moved the cage all over the house. Is this warmer? No. It's already 63 F and dropping (when his usual room temperature is 72). I dithered around. I covered the cage with a tablecloth, wondering if he could breathe. He clung to the pointy roof of his palatial cage, silent and not moving.

Then I thought: what's the warmest room in the house? Our bedroom! During our rare Vancouver heat waves, it's absolutely awful, and sometimes I have to sleep downstairs. So I lugged his huge cage upstairs and gained purchase of 3 degrees, but it was not enough.

My mind spun around and around. Did we have any source of heat left? Should I stick him in my pocket or something? Then I thought: of course! Hot water. But my idea was not quite on-target.

I put a bowl of hot water on the floor of his cage, covered with a sieve so the dumb bird wouldn't try to bathe in it and scald himself. It bought me a couple more degrees. But it still wasn't enough.

Depressed and isolated, not wanting to go out because I had to look after this incubator baby, I phoned my daughter-in-law to ask if she had power. She did. She also had, right to hand, a number to call for info on power outages.

"But it'll take me hours. They'll put me on hold."

"No they won't. Try it."

They didn't. I got the information I needed in 30 seconds. The power would be on no later than 4:00 (and it was 1:00: would we squeak through?) She also suggested, instead of bowls of water that got cold in 2 minutes, to fill the bathtub with a few inches of hot water and wheel the cage into the bathroom and shut the door.

Within 15 minutes, I had set up the ideal sauna, and Jasper was thawing out, singing and chirping and ringing his numerous bells and acting like a bird again.

Anyway, all this shit ended at 2 pm, after 6 hours of blackout. It could've gone all night, in which case my bird would have died of hypothermia.

So, completely unrelated to this, or not, I was exhausted by the evening, lonely, sugar-logged, and just wanting any old thing to distract me. Maybe I shouldn't have picked Lust for Life.

Vincente Minnelli strove to make this movie as faithful to Van Gogh's paintings and life as possible. He dragged trees in to fill holes where they had been cut down. He put up a false front for the yellow house Van Gogh lived in with Gaugin (a bravura performance by Anthony Quinn, who likes his women "fat and vicious and not too bright"). Stories circulated about old women from remote places in Provence who gasped on seeing Douglas in makeup and exclained, "He has returned!"

A companion movie, a "making of" was shown after the main feature, and in it Douglas spoke fluent French to one of these elderly keepers-of-the-memory (who are all gone now). Why did it surprise me to see Douglas speak fluent French? He was the Ragman's Son (I read his auto-bio years ago, and he came up from such dire poverty that the family sometimes had nothing to eat). I associate him with powerhouse roles, Spartacus and the like,and that exaggerated growling voice beloved of impressionists (not the painters!) like Frank Gorshin.

I don't know what happened here. Some kind of transubstantiation. He - became. He felt this man. He slipped into his skin, his uneasy incendiary brain. The thing is, Van Gogh painted innumerable self-portraits, and all of them had something of Kirk Douglas in them. In some cases he could have been the model.

I don't know what my point is here, and I guess I don't have one. Life is a mess, and right now I'm a mess, full of sugar, lonely, completely stalled and discouraged in my work, yet still blown away by a couple of things.

The sun is shining right now. Shining on the high cedar boughs that garland my upstairs office view. The light is dappled and various, a Gerard Manley Hopkins light.

The sun is out. I never thought I'd see it again.

I don't know why we keep on. Sometimes it's wretched. Ask any genius. We have a spark of life in us, like a candle inside a blubberous whale. Van Gogh had to paint quickly because he knew he didn't have much time. "You paint too fast!" Gaugain roared at him. "You look too fast!" he growled back.

I'm not even going to try to tie all this together because life, as it is, isn't tied together very well. It's sloppy and hard to navigate. For me, anyway. It's better and worse. Some suffer more than others.

But I'm glad my little bird made it back into the light.